‘Summer House With Swimming Pool’

The New York Times

Published in English last year, “The Dinner,” by the Dutch writer Herman Koch, became an international best seller in part by occupying that slender intersection between literary and commercial fiction. Its prose has the direct, →

‘Summer House With Swimming Pool’

Published in English last year, “The Dinner,” by the Dutch writer Herman Koch, became an international best seller in part by occupying that slender intersection between literary and commercial fiction. Its prose has the direct, undemanding quality of an airport novel, its story the momentum of a page turner. Yet its more literary devices — an elegant structure, with each section titled by course, “Aperitif,” “Appetizer” and so on, as a single restaurant dinner progresses; a narrator who seems increasingly unreliable — suggest a greater complexity, an ambition to achieve Higher Things.